October 7th, 2010

When startups get funding, it’s common practice for them to go into a series of build versus buy decisions in regards to their technology. Sometimes, it’s simply faster and easier to incorporate an existing project—especially if that project includes some compelling resources—than it is to start from scratch.

What does this acquisition bring to Puppet Labs and the Puppet user community? Marionette or MCollective, which falls in the same vein Capistrano, is an open source framework that helps admins simplify configuration management across multiple servers. So it will fit nicely within the Puppet Labs family. It also means that R.I. Pienaar, the leader of the project, will be joining the Puppet Labs team.

“Puppet has always focused on the problem of configuration management, but solving that doesn’t make all of your problems go away,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, in a press release. “MCollective targets the next layer of change control and orchestration in a small but powerful tool that already integrates well with Puppet. With both Puppet and MCollective, our customers and users have a unified solution that scales from small departments and one-off installations to large server farms running tens of thousands of servers.”

But what, exactly, does Marionette do? To hear MCollective tell it:

MCollective is an open source framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems. It enables real-time discovery of network resources and can select which resources to affect based on configuration data from leading systems management platforms, including Puppet. MCollective works with many leading message queues including ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ.

How will this affect the Portland office? R.I. will remain in the UK and will be “heavily involved in integration and continued development.” Puppet Labs also has plans to add local development talent to assist with the MCollective project.